To the proposition that electroplating the dead is the best way to
dispose of them there is this considerable objection—it does not
dispose of them. The plan is not without its advantages, some of which
are obvious enough to mention. Nothing, for example, can be more
satisfactory to a husband engaged in dying than the reflection that
as a nickel-plated statue of himself he may still adorn the conjugal
fireside and become an object of peculiar interest and sympathy to
his successor. There are few remains, indeed, to whom this would not
seem a softer billet than “to lie in cold obstruction” in a cemetery,
from which, after all, one is usually routed out in a few years to
accommodate a corner grocery or a boarding-house.
The light cost of ornamenting our public buildings with distinguished
men themselves, as compared with the present enormous expense of
obtaining statues of them, will commend the régime of electroplating
to every frugal taxpayer and make him hail its dawn with a peculiar
joy. In order to make the most of this advantage it is to be hoped
that any public-spirited “prominent citizen” feeling his sands of life
about run out, would consent to be posed by an artist in some striking
and heroic attitude, ready for the _rigor mortis_ to fix him in
it for the plater. It would be but a trifling sacrifice for a great
writer to pass the last ten minutes of his life cross-legged in a
chair, with a pen in one hand and a thumb and forefinger of the other
spanning a space on his dome of thought. A distinguished statesman
would not find it so very inconvenient to breathe his last standing in
the characteristic attitude of his profession, his left thumb supported
in the opening of a waistcoat thoughtfully constructed to button the
wrong way, and his right hand holding a scroll. In dying grandly on the
acclivity of a rearing horse, a famous warrior could at the same time
lay his countrymen under an added obligation and assist them fitly to
discharge it.
The process of electroplation (if one may venture to anticipate a
word that is inevitable) does not, unluckily, permit us to retain
the deceased “in his habit as he lived,” textile fabrics not being
susceptible to the magic of its method; but the figures of eminent
decedents exposed in public places to fire the ambition of American
youth could be provided with real tailor-made suits, either in the
fashion of their time and Congressional district or in that of ancient
Rome, as might be preferred by the public taste for the time being,
and the tailors’ bills would probably, in some instances, be almost
as interesting, if not nearly so startling, as that item in an early
English Passion-play account, in which the management is charged five
shillings and sixpence for “a cote for Godd.”
To that entire class of decedents whom we may call
eminent-public-services men, the objection that electroplating the dead
does not permanently dispose of them has no practical application.
Of them we do not wish to dispose; we want to retain them for
embellishment of our parks, the façades of our public buildings and
the walls of our art galleries. But in its relation to “vulgar deaths
unknown to fame” the objection is indeed fatal. If this mortal is going
to put on immortality in so strictly literal a sense—if the dead are to
be still with us in a tangible and visible reality, the fact will be
embarrassing, no doubt. Under a régime in which a dead man will take up
as much room as a living one, it is evident that the dead in general
will take up a deal more than the living, and the disproportion will
increase at an alarming rate.
Science assures us that but for death—including decay—the world would
now be so overcrowded that there would be “standing room only,”
even for scientists. Electroplating proposes to enjoin decay. Is
it advisable? Is it wise? Is it fair to posterity? Shall we impose
ourselves upon those who “inherit us,” without providing for the
expense of our warehousing? It can hardly be expected that even the
most “well-preserved old gentleman” will be an object of veneration
and affection to his great-great-great-grandchild, even if he is so
fortunate as to be authentic—unless, indeed, he happen to be plated
with gold. In that case, though, he would be hardly likely to descend
intact to so remote a generation. An unusually comely electroplatee of
the opposing sex might be a joy forever as a work of art, and the task
of polishing her be a labor of love for many centuries; but the common
ruck of hard-shell ancestors, although bearing inscriptions attesting
their possession of the loftiest virtues in their day and generation,
would inspire an insufficiently tender emotion to pay for their lodging.
The time when our beautiful, but not altogether wholesome, cemeteries
shall be no more, and in the place of them countless myriads of
battered and rusted images shall be corded up like firewood all over
the smiling land is a time which we may be thankful that we shall not
live to see, and which our love of display should not make us selfishly
assist in expediting. It is a glittering temptation, but in fair play
to posterity (which has never done anything to embarrass us) it ought
to be put resolutely aside.